For All Russia, Biological Clock Is Running Out

By MICHAEL WINES

Published: December 28, 2000

RYAZAN, Russia—
If Ina Chaikovskaya does not have it all, she has more than most women in this ancient military town: brains and pluck, an apartment and a Zhiguli sedan bought with profits from her own business, a pointed wit.

What she does not have, and would like, are a husband and children. At 37, she is running out of time.

''There are no normal men,'' she complained, curled up in jeans and a sweater on a sofa, her companion -- a 7-month-old orange tabby cat -- staring out the balcony window. ''They've all got an inferiority complex because they can't earn enough money to support a family. All of them live with their mothers. They all earn 1,000, 1,500 rubles a month,'' $35 to $55, roughly.

''Who would want to bear a child with a man like that?'' she asked.

In Ryazan, a struggling industrial city southeast of Moscow, the answer is clear: hardly anybody. In the last decade, the marriage rate here has plummeted 30 percent. The divorce rate has leaped 60 percent.

Not surprisingly, the birthrate is down 40 percent, too.

This is the flip side to Russia's decade-long epidemic of rising mortality: a baby bust of alarming speed and size, winnowing the nation's population by millions -- and likely to continue for years. Europe's highest-fertility country just a decade ago, Russia today is right down there with Spain and Italy as the lowest.

New births last year in Russia occurred at the rate of 8.4 per 1,000 people, compared with 13.4 in 1990. Put another way, Russia's fertility rate -- the average number of babies a woman is expected to bear -- was just 1.17, down from 1.89 in 1990.

The outlook, then, is for a shrinking, aging population when there is a crucial need for young people to rejuvenate Russia's farms, re-energize industry and rebuild the economy.

The twin trends -- rising deaths and declining births -- are both rooted in the social and public-health upheavals that have swept the nation since the Soviet Union entered its death throes in 1991. Both trends have confounded experts, who expected them to be neither as serious nor as prolonged as they have been.

The country's health care has collapsed in the last decade, along with the people's health. Public hospitals and clinics are short of money and medicine; doctors earn near-poverty wages; infectious diseases like tuberculosis are epidemic.

No one doubts the decay has fed a rise in mortality unparalleled in recent peacetime history. And no one believes this is merely a medical issue. Rather, it is a signal that poverty and stress are eroding the government's ability to care for its own.

Experts, including some at United States intelligence agencies, fear deteriorating public health could lead to political upheavals at worst, or aid emergencies at best.

Low fertility is the norm in many Western nations, of course, thanks largely to women's emancipation and widespread birth control. Even in Russia, birthrates crept slowly downward for decades before the 1990's.

But the latest plunge is different: driven not by women's broader choices, but by the fact that many of their options -- marital, medical, social, financial -- have been all but obliterated by the earthquake that destroyed the Soviet Union.

Some turnaround surely will occur, but when, nobody knows. Experts once believed that Russia's mothers would start bearing children again after the upheavals of the early 1990's. Instead, Russia's birthrate fell another 10 percent.

By all estimates, the population will continue to shrink. Russia has already lost 3.3 million people since its population peaked in 1992. It will lose tens of millions more, experts predict, regardless of whether births pick up. The only question is how many.

According to projections prepared at the United Nations, Russia will contract in the next five decades from its current 145 million people to 121 million, the level of 1960.

One Russian demographer, Sergei Yermakov, of the Research Public Health Institute, says Russia could shrink to as few as 80 million people, 10 million fewer than at the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917.

''Children are being put off right now,'' said Sergei V. Zakharov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, perhaps the leading expert on Russian fertility. ''They are going to end up being born. The question is how many -- two or three. But the answer to that question isn't clear.''

The Reasons Why

Ms. Chaikovskaya does not think the birth drought will end soon. After a decade of social upheaval and poverty, creating a child here seems less an act of love, lust or even calculation than it is an act of pure will, and perhaps faith.

''No one wants to have babies,'' she said. ''Even the middle class starts thinking, Can we afford to have babies? Everybody knows that everything in Russia is bad right now.''

The province of Ryazan, a Maryland-size patch of flat, black earth etched with S-curves by the Moscow River on its way toward the Volga, ranks 82nd in fertility among Russia's 89 provinces. The birthrate -- seven babies per 1,000 women each year -- is one-sixth below the Russian average. In the past two years, one of Ryazan's four maternity hospitals has closed.